


Let It Pour

by codenamecynic



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Committed Relationship, F/M, Fluff, Post-War, Sole Survivor (Mass Effect)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-11
Updated: 2016-02-11
Packaged: 2018-05-19 17:57:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5976058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/codenamecynic/pseuds/codenamecynic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The war is over, but the scars it leaves never really fade.  Shepard and Kaidan on a quiet rainy morning in Rio.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let It Pour

The wind blows crisp and cool off Guanabara Bay, even in the midst of February.  It’s too early for sun, the air and sea taking on the same ruddy hue that makes the skyline on the eastern horizon fuzzy and indistinct, the tall buildings of Niterói and São Gonҫalo little more than towering gray shapes in the distance.

Next to the massive cities she’s seen on other worlds, Rio de Janeiro is small.  The buildings here are not as tall as elsewhere, the bones of the old city still evident beneath the modern construction.  They’ve come back here every other year since the end of the war; cumulatively, it’s the longest she’s ever stayed in one place.  Next to the Normandy, it’s really the only home she’s ever had.

Kaidan never complains, but she can always sense that it unnerves him.  His parents’ home in Canada is a far cry from the tropics, cool and dry and wintery. He’s told her a million times that the seasons do actually change and that every once in a while there’s this something called ‘spring’, but it’s snowing every time they visit and Shepard has long since decided that Canada is a wood fire, maple syrup, and her husband in an ugly Christmas sweater.

It’s not even 0600 when she heads back toward the villa.  It’s an actual villa, much to her surprise; she never saw anything half so nice during N-School.  Not that it didn’t make sense – the point of N-School is to run you ragged, make you hate yourself, break you in half and then put you back together again into a lean, mean, alien fighting machine.  Grunt’s words, not hers.  She was fairly certain there was a _pandejo_ in there somewhere too - Vega’s clear influence.

It’s a nice place, though.  There’s an old world feel to it, like a governor’s mansion in one of those pirate movies set in the 18th century.  Colonial as hell and out of place against the dense jungle backdrop of the training grounds they call the Killing Field, but jogging up the drive is like stepping out of time.

She’d needed that, after the war.  Now she shows back up to teach, but then – in those nine months between waking up in the middle of a war zone and the Normandy making port at the half-wrecked Kennedy Space Center in Florida, she’d needed to drown.  Zaeed was the first person she called – something neither Liara nor Miranda have forgiven her for – and he’d taken her crying ass and her newly grafted arm down to Mexico.  They’d run the coast all the way down to Rio, camped out on the beach, crushed beer cans against their foreheads and watched hovercraft haul pieces of a downed Reaper out of the bay.  Nobody told Hackett, but Shepard has a sneaking suspicion he’d known.

By the time the comms were back up she’d straightened out, evened her keel, and the Normandy was on her way back home.  They’d been lucky, so lucky that sometimes it doesn’t even feel real.

The house is still dark when she sneaks back in, kicking shoes off by the door and ghosting up the stairs, light on the balls of her feet. 

Kaidan is still fast asleep, white sheets twisted around his waist and one arm flung up above his head.  He’s a little grayer, a little leaner, but he’s still handsome enough to make her cybernetic heart skip a beat, as beautiful now as he was six years ago when she’d first laid eyes on him, laughing with Joker and Jenkins in his quiet way as she’d hauled ass and duffel bag up the ramp to the SR1.

It had been hard for her, at first – the quietude, the reserve.  She was all gunfire and percussion, half-cocked schemes and skin-of-your-teeth saves; he’d always been her buffer, absorbing some of the shock of Shepard flinging herself against the world.  They’d orbited one another, shrapnel spinning in the wake of an explosion; she hadn’t realized how much she relied upon his immovable center, even after they’d collided.  After all, it had only taken dying – _twice_ – and an intergalactic war to make her decide to double down and seal the deal.

Dumbass.  She’s a walking disaster.

She can be gentle, though.  Sometimes.  Rarely.  She’s always had a hard time making things fit, especially after Akuze, and she’d rattled her way out of politics and right back into her role as SPECTRE.  With an Alliance promotion, of course – not that the Council cared, or gave two halves a crap about what ranks their operatives held in other governments.  She could be queen of fucking England – if it wasn’t still a smoking crater.

She must have sighed, or huffed, or existed too loudly in the quiet space of their four walls; Kaidan shifts, hand sliding through the short crop of his hair to rub at his eyes, awake in the span of a second.

“Hon?  What time is it?”

“O-dark-thirty.  Go back to sleep, babe.”

“Mmn, too late.”  Without sitting up he reaches for her, pulling her down on top of him when she crosses over to his side of the bed.

She wrinkles her nose, propping herself up with hands braced on either side of his hips.  “I’m gross.”

“Been running?”

“Mhmm.”

“You smell like rain.”

Probably like sweat too, which never really bothers either of them, but their sheets are clean.

His hands are soft on the small of her back; not smooth but gentle, framing her hips when she sits up to straddle him.  She’s still all knotted scars and raggedly stitched skin over whipcord muscle like some kind of grisly trophy of war, but he always makes her feel - softer.  Pretty.  Human.  It’s the woman in her he loves, not the weapon, even if it is the weapon the galaxy wielded against the Reapers to save itself.

“Did you dream?”

“Hardly at all.”

He laughs at that, his voice low and husky with sleep.  His mouth shapes a smile that she traces with her fingers.  “I think gunfire may actually be good for you, Shepard.”

“Occupational hazard,” she dismisses, the thought making one corner of her mouth pull into a grimace.  Neither of them are the sort to quit, to ‘retire into private life’ or whatever the phrase is, that euphemism for running away.  She’s always been a wrecking ball, but Kaidan is a builder.  With him she’s learned to see the moving parts, the raw potential, and not just the rubble.

She still doesn’t know what he’s thinking, though, when he looks at her like that.  Like he’s got ideas for what to do with all of _her_ errant pieces, like if he turns her over and over in his hands he might find the places where some of them fit.  It may take him a while to settle on what he thinks, to weigh all the options, but Kaidan sees _everything_.  Even now, it’s unnerving.

“Do you want to get up?” she asks, trying to banish the feeling, shuttering his steady gaze by leaning in for a kiss.  He pulls her down when she does, turns them in a twist of sheets to where she’s beneath him, warm and safe and amused in the space between the breadth of his shoulders.

“I think we have a little time.”

She can’t help but smile. She can never help but smile.

“Do we?”

“It’s raining.”

“It’s always raining.”

“Then let it pour.”


End file.
